Sunday, March 16, 2014

Happy St Patrick's Day! I hope your weekend was as relaxed as mine. Here is my manicure for St Paddy's Day - shamrocks, obviously. I know, I know, I suck at freehand nail art and it was the easiest thing in the world to want to reach for my stamper and a plate but I have vowed to step outside my comfort zone this year, so you can expect to see more freehand doodles and horrific experiments on my nails.
A St Patrick's Day manicure would obviously be green for most part. I get that. But I didn't want my base colour to be green-green, if you get what I am trying to say. So I picked China Glaze OMG It's A UFO from the Hologram Collection Spring/Summer 2013.

Read on to find out how I did this St Patrick's Day green shamrock nail art.

A golden-olive green polish, OMG It's A UFO is the strongest holo polish in the Hologram Collection - the holo effect turns up only if you contort your fingers, the camera lens and the light in all sorts of weird directions. Here are pictures in direct sunlight, since photographs in natural light are not going to show you the holo-ness of this polish.

The formula is very good, though - quick-drying and long-wearing, easy to apply, thin and opaque in two coats. The photograph below is in natural light so you can see there is no inkling of a holo effect anywhere.

Over this beautiful polish, I performed my freehand shenanigans. First, I outlined the shamrocks - I went in for trefoil rather than four leaves as I knew even three were beyond my unstable hands - using O.P.I. Here Today Aragon Tomorrow, which is a super-deep vampy green creme.

Within this, I applied O.P.I. Greenwich Village from the Mod About Brights Collection - this is a typical O.P.I. creme, thick and opaque. I added two "buttons" in the middle of each shamrock with Here Today Aragon Tomorrow to show off that I could at least make freehand dots. All my shamrocks are lopsided and asymmetric, of course!

P.S. I am unable to reply to any of your comments as the reply button below each comment isn't working :( I shall try to fix it over the next couple of days and switch over to Disqus or Google+ comments if nothing works.
This is part of a N.A.I.L. challenge for March, hosted by Crafty Nails and Brigit's Digits. Check out some beautiful nail art designs for St Patrick's Day here!

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